I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods. — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly those from Central America during the recent civil wars there. But there is confusion too: I know of Croatian Nazis who are subsidized by the Canadian government to maintain their racist culture. There is Canada, trying… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share
My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me -… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were doctors. He became a doctor because his mother cleaned office buildings at night, and because she loved her children. She grew bowlegged from cleaning office buildings at night, and in the process she taught him something… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share
In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share
I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's,… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share
